The first artist since Merle Haggard to effectively glamorize California’s dusty honky-tonk corridors, Dave Alvin and his roots-rock cohorts The Blasters fused blues and country with a unique back-street punk edge. Like a West Coast Springsteen for the early ’90s, Alvin’s solo albums showcased his deep, rumbling voice (which sounds…
Well, well, Weller–another album hailed as “comeback” in the U.K., where it’s been available in slightly altered form since September, and another album sure to be labeled “sell back” in the U.S., where a handful of remaining old fans will wonder why they ever bothered at all. You can’t damn…
Sean Paul’s success in commercial hip-hop markets doesn’t make him a sellout–yet. His ubiquitous ganja-burner anthem, “Gimme the Light,” is genuine dancehall reggae, even if backed by Atlantic’s major-label clout. And as with his 2000 debut, Stage One, Paul’s sophomore release, Dutty Rock, collects his biggest–and therefore, some of dancehall’s…
Dot Allison is best known as the ex-singer of Scottish trio One Dove, which quickly came and went back in 1993. One Dove’s detached coolness and dub explorations (courtesy of Primal Scream producer Andrew Weatherall) still generated enough earth tones to keep it grounded in dance-pop. In fact, One Dove’s…
Once upon a time way back in the early 1990s, a clan called Wu-Tang formed, with GZA “at the head.” Two years after its seminal 1993 debut, Enter the Wu-Tang, the Clan issued its twin classics: Method Man’s Tical and GZA’s Liquid Swords. Each album placed urban and kung-fu mythology…
A roundtable discussion of music in 2002, featuring me and two people I made up: Zac Crain: Many have compared these rock-and-roll days to the beginning of the 1990s, when youths in revolt found nirvana in Nirvana. I don’t buy that. Sure, yeah, whatever, the White Stripes and the Strokes…
You’ll love anything you got for free, and if you don’t think that’s true, you’ve never seen a free-pass preview audience applaud a Rob Schneider movie. That’s why Aimee Mann’s tuneless-soulless Lost in Space tops some tone-deaf crits’ year-end lists, why Beck’s Sea Change is praised as a “masterpiece” when…
1. Eminem, The Eminem Show (Interscope) 2. Various Artists, Music From and Inspired by the Motion Picture 8 Mile (Interscope) 3. Linkin Park, Reanimation (Warner Bros.) 4. Dave Matthews Band, Busted Stuff (RCA) 5. Nelly, Nellyville (Universal) 6. Nas, God’s Son (Columbia) 7. Jay-Z, The Blueprint 2: The Gift &…
Top 10 Albums 1. Norah Jones, Come Away With Me (Blue Note) 2. Tom Waits, Blood Money and Alice (ANTI-) 3. Beck, Sea Change (Interscope) 4. Six Feet Under, Music from the HBO Original Series (Universal) 5. N.E.R.D., In Search Of… (Virgin) 6. The White Stripes, White Blood Cells (V2)…
1. Christina Aguilera, Stripped (RCA): Last year was Christina Aguilera’s for the taking: Stripped, the long-awaited follow-up to her smash 1999 debut, arrived just as teen-pop took its first steps into a delicate post-pubescence, with artists making bolder creative statements and listeners actually taking them seriously. But instead of delivering…
Listmaking, especially the year-end variety, lends itself to the careful selection of absolute favorites–picking which albums and singles best articulated a certain idea, emotion, joke or sensation. But 2002, like the past couple of years before it, didn’t yield such easy victors; filesharing, cheap technology and the increased intermingling of…
Slobberbone, Slippage (New West): The best bar band in America–not just Denton or Dallas or Fort Worth–delivers a rock record (“Springfield, IL.” and “Write Me Off”) that knows it doesn’t always have to (“Sister Beams” and “Back”). It’s “classic rock” if you mean “timeless,” “modern rock” if you mean “now.”…
American music magazines suck. Rolls off the tongue, don’t it? These days it’s rolling off everyone’s. Saunter down the length of a magazine rack and scowl at the teen-pop hoochie starlets, the drooling trendpigism (“The Strokes! The Hives! The White Stripes!”), the vapid rock-star puff pieces, the gutless CD reviews…
How difficult it is to type the words: Joe Strummer, songwriter-singer-guitarist for the Clash, is dead at the age of 50. The stomach dropped at the sight of the words coming across the CNN crawl early Monday morning; impossible so vital a musician and so vigorous a man could disappear…
So I was in Tower Records the other day, and I saw that System of a Down has a new CD out called Steal This Album. Since their last one was kind of a letdown, certainly not worth the full $17 list price, I figured, “What the fuck? I’ll crotch…
The oddest mash-up of the year, discounting that Missy Elliott-Joy Division joint (roach, actually) that hasn’t left the 10-disc changer since May: Paul Young (yup, that one–no parlez?) fronts a Tex-Mex confab consisting of Brits, which rhymes with “shits” and with good goddamned reason. The road to hell is paved…
Saint Etienne traffic in opposites: A product of dismal Thatcher-era England, the trio buried its late-’80s angst in candied dance-pop that conflated disco’s feel-good throb with girl-group élan and ’60s-pop melodies, only to go live-band for 1998’s sparkling Good Humor, hooking up with Cardigans producer Tore Johansson at the exact…
The New York-based dance label Ultra excels at neat summations of current electronic-music fads: Its recent electroclash compilation pitted young nü-wavers like Chicks on Speed and Fischerspooner against their stalwart ’80s antecedents, and its new trance set, though by definition creatively atrophied, condenses all the big-room exhilaration that scene has…
With their powerhouse chords and heavy riffs, the Toadies still evoke nostalgic memories of the musical ennui and confusion of the mid-’90s, when cries of “sellout!” reverberated loudly through the rarefied air of certain punk and alternative-music circles. As avaricious radio programmers co-opted punk and sold it to a mainstream…
Precisely why Guns N’ Roses’ North American tour came to an abrupt end last week, days before it was scheduled to hit the American Airlines Center on December 19, may be a mystery never totally untangled. Sure, there have been hints and rumors: Front man Axl Rose insisted the New…
Electric Circus, the new album by the Chicago-bred rapper Common, is a late contender for hip-hop album of the year: It’s a wildly textured, lovingly drawn tapestry of urban psychedelia that, like Meshell Ndegeocello’s recently overlooked Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape, imagines the form as a febrile mixture of funk, soul,…
I know, I know–you fell in love with Watermark, fell in love to Watermark or maybe just heard Enya while walking around the mall and thought she was singing to you even though you don’t understand Latin and can’t tell the diff between Gaelic and Elvish. At this very moment,…
